Brand Reputation Management
Engaging with Millennials is one of the most talked about marketing problems & targeting priorities that every brand must deal with. If you are a corporate brand or a high-profile/high net worth individual personal brand, how you market yourself to Millennials is of key importance now and in the coming years.
By 2020, almost half of the US workforce will be Millennials. They are socialized to be lifelong learners, are the most savvy consumers in history and are known to be advertising resistant, many of whom are completely Add immune. This is psychological, and not due to add blockers.
The online reputation management of your brand will therefore have to optimize your best content to appeal to these collaborative leaders of the next generation.
The reputation management industry is maturing with the evolution of SEO, content, social media and digital technologies. How reputation management intersects with the most educated and digitally addicted generation in history, is highly relevant to the digital influence of your brand upon customer acquisition, customer retention and sales.
Demonstrating that you are customer centric in today’s digital ecosystem and sales funnel, more and more, actually means being Millennial-centric in your branding, marketing and PR strategy.
ORM is Critical for Engaging Millennials
In an age of mobile natives (Millennial generation), how search, public relations (PR) and marketing campaigns are done is changing very quickly. Millennials are driving these trends forwards as a faster pace than many businesses can manage.
As such, Millennials are the most peer & influencer-marketing influenced generation in history and the most adept at searching for reviews online. So to summarize Millennials are:
Mobile and digital natives
Peer Influenced
Influencer influenced
Adept at Search and Review Sites
Online reputation management (ORM), is therefore an important strategy to consider when implementing a marketing plan and social media campaigns targeted at Millennials.
Since Millennials require brands to be personable, authentic, helpful, educational and in tune with their reality, negative reviews and incriminating feedback from customers can easily dissuade them from buying.
ORM can be a key factor in how brands elevate their marketing strategy to adapt to Millennials searching about products or services via mobile search.
In a recent report on social media today, 94% of women interact with brands online on an active basis. As Millennials drive many of the online, content and search engine reputation management (SERM) trends, brands are required to know the most optimal and highest ROI ways of getting the best possible results on Google and monitoring their ORM on an on-going basis.
Reputation management, is therefore at the forefront of how PR and SEO (search engine optimization) can boost engagement with Millennials for your brand and in particular, identify and remedy crisis management, and identity branding & search emergencies as they occur in the normal lifecycle of any brand online.
Millennials with their insistence on transparency, social advocacy, and their fondness for corporate social responsibility indicates that corporate and personal brands have to adapt themselves to the values of this audience. ORM is implicated in how content marketing is optimized for search and brand discovery, arguably, the most important digital influence on sales.
Negative reviews can in today’s social media world, be quickly amplified by Millennial brand advocates and Millennial (peer) influencers themselves leading to unintentional negative press, detrimental PR and even litigation issues for brands without an ORM strategy and solution.
ORM can thus lead to better branding strategy that is conducive to an optimized Millennial following, that will play a significant role in how your corporate or personal brand scales in the coming years as Millennials are set to be the most important demographic online.
An ORM solution can implement the following workflow for your brand’s SEO issues:
Monitor, audit and carefully report on the reputation management issues of your individual or commercial brand.
Identify content which is potentially damaging to your brand and gaps in your SEO that lowers your credibility, social authority and trust among Millennial audiences.
Communicate relevant SEO changes and possible PR issues with your marketing team.
Take necessary reverse SEO and ORM actions to suppress the negative information that may be damaging search results and therefore customer engagement and even sales.
Since Millennials are highly engaged and interactive users of review sites, comments, user generated content, social media channels experts, and so forth; optimizing your brand’s reputation management issues relating to them makes a lot of sense.
ORM for Millennial engagement facilitates the optimal ROI of search results on Google for your brand and business.
Millennials make up the most active demographic on such sites and social apps that often have a high impact on the brand impressions of your products and services, such as:
Yelp
Foursquare
Facebook Ratings
TripAdvisor
Pinterest
Instagram, etc…
Stats on Millennials
Millennials are considered a very important demographic in marketing as they lead mobile and digital trends forward. In addition the following statistics shed some light on their tendencies.
Millennials make up 27% of the US population.
They review blogs (33%) and peer reviews as important indicators before making a purchase.
Millennials value “authenticity” (43%) over content authority when consumer News.
According to Deloitte, Millennials have tenacious personal values that do not tend to change even as they move up the corporate ladder or gain an inheritance.
Millennials are a Significant Consumer Demographic
Millennials will spend $200 billion annually by 2017 and up to $10 trillion over their lifetimes as consumers in the US.
Millennials are social consumers who sleep near their smartphone and who has a group experience social validation online. For example, 70% are more excited about a decision they have made when their friends agree with them, compared to only 48% for non-Millennials.
As of February 2016, 25% of Millennials in the US are parents and by 2026, this will be near 80%.
Over 80% use YouTube (and Netflix) more than they watch TV and text more than they talk on their smartphones.
A number of Millennials cite their parents as important purchasing touch points and this makes their parents as highly implicated in their purchasing decisions indicating Millennials may be the most important demographic for purchasing decision engagement in an inter-generational family.
Reputation management techniques are uniquely positioned to scale with how Millennials interact with your brand today and tomorrow, in its ability to strengthen the SEO of your best content, while fixing PR and content discrepancies that could lower your brand impressions and brand engagement.
In today’s ever changing mobile and digital search ecosystems, online reputation management is poised to help you engage with Millennials.
Michael Spencer is a branding strategist and copywriter based out of Montreal. He is one of the most featured authors on LinkedIn’s Millennials channel.